Who’s behind the wheel? Visioning the future users and urban contexts of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are promised by their developers to transform mobilities, making travel accessible to all – including those unable to drive due to age, affordability or disability – and thereby widen the distribution of what Urry calls ‘network capital’. This paper interrogates promotional visualizations about CAVs as they imagine future automated mobilities and the scaling up of the technologies from small trials to mass roll-out. It analyses a wide range of images from a CAV trial in a UK city and demonstrates that these images reinforce rather than disrupt traditional gendered associations of automobility. This study further develops this work and notes other ways in which visualizations of CAV-enabled network mobility reiterate existing network capital inequalities. It also pays careful attention to the background urban environment in which CAVS are pictured. The paper argues that an absence of people and place specificity enable CAV technologies to be imagined as being used in other locations and contexts. Hence the visualizations of CAV that picture only specific forms corporeal mobility also work to envision the mobility of entrepreneurial capital, as the software and hardware behind the driverless vehicle is shown as transferable to, and profitable in, different contexts and situations

TCPS as a specialised education stream

Transport CPS is a major area of growth and investment in many countries, but there is a significant shortage of engineers with the correct skills to build safe, secure, and efficient TCPS. It is suggested that a much broader education is required in CPS than has traditionally been the case for degree and Masters’ level students. CPS developers will need to be knowledgeable about natural, applied, and social sciences. The curriculum for a TCPS engineer emerges as a vast range of knowledge requirements and it is suggested that ideally students will graduate with a T-shaped curriculum vitae that provides for a broad knowledge of many subjects, and a deep knowledge of one or two. Studies into the appropriate curriculum for CPS have been conducted since the early 2000s, but it is noted that many of these failed to give adequate weight to topics in the social sciences and to ethics. A framework for TCPS graduate and post-graduate education is provided: delivery of the curriculum must ensure students are taught in a transdisciplinary manner and develop an holistic approach to TCPS development and operation